Ashen Citadel air vibrated with low resonant frequency, a sound which was more felt than heard in the teeth rather than audible in the ears. It was the blood-beat of an empire of Marek Voss, a converted Bio-Syndicate observatory which now thrust the never-ending twilt of the Ash Frontier like a black glass and fused bone needle. In his throne room which had been a brilliant cartography room Marek glanced down at the wasteland below through a pane of one-way crystallized ash.
He was an outline of jagged lines and had strength. The ragged biopriest coat in which he had clothed himself appeared to imbibe the light, and the red fissures crawling up and down his flesh to be throbbing with the sound of the humming of the Citadel. He was the Ash Prophet to his new disciples, a messiah who created a new world with the brush of divine fire. However, even in the stillness, gazing down the abyss he had helped to make, he was the strategist, the brother-in-arms, the architect of a betrayal that shook a world and a man.
"He tends flowers, you said."
His voice was deep and tuneful and with a weight that seemed to lie down on the inhabitant of the room. The man was a scout, a wirly scout, whose eyes were like frightened insects, and he flinched.
"Y-yes, Prophet. In a glass house. He... he waters them. Talks to them, maybe. We saw no weapons. No sign of the Burn."
The lips of Marek smiled like a ghost. It was not such a nice expression. "The Burn is always there. He's just built a cage for it. A very, very flimsy cage." He swiveled around and looked into Kael with his flushed eyes. Ryder had been the most discipline of all us. The ideal scalpel of the Syndicate. He believes that he can be able to meditate the war out of his blood. He's wrong. The war is all we have left."
He started to walk, his movements smooth, almost savage. He perceives that flower as an embodiment of the past. A relic. I must make him see it as it is a delusion. A weakness. The man who is holding on to a ghost will end up drowning. But a man who has been murdered with his ghost before his eyes... that man has nothing more to do but burn.
Kael swallowed hard. Will I set up a kill-team, my Prophet? Eradicate him, we may wipe him out of the valley.
No, no, Marek said, whip-crack. You have forgotten the whole point of the exercise. I don't want him erased. I want him enraged. I would like him to have in mind how it is like to lose something very important. I would like to demonstrate to him that his peace is a deception that can be crushed by the shoe of any thug.
He no longer paced, but bent near Kael, and in a conspiratorial low tone of voice which was more frightening than all yelling, said: You will have two of your most unmanageable brutes. The type who like to destroy. You will go to his... his 'Solitude'." He gave the word the contempt of mocking. "You will not kill him. You will send my invitation to be with us in our new splendid day. And when even he, ever, declines...
Marek sat up, and looked back toward the window, into the valley far away, beyond which in his unseen world was Ryder Graves, his game of being a farmer.
you will shatter his glass house. And he will have his little garden trampled over by you. You will come into the ruins of his shaky peace, and you will laugh. You will cause him to feel helpless. You will demonstrate to him that the powerful are not nurturers of life; they take it away.
Kael's face was pale. He understood the order. It was much more serious than an assassination. And when he... when the Cinder Saint burns?
Smiling at last brought the light of a fanatical fire to the eyes of Marek. Then will my old friend have been straight with himself. And the spark I shall leave smouldering in that valley shall be a kind of lighthouse, and bring him to the one thing only that he has ever been: a weapon.
He waved a dismissive hand. "Go. Be the boot. Be the mockery. Be the match."
As Kael skurried out of the room Marek went back to his panorama of the wastes. He could nearly feel the earth-quake that was going to happen. Ryder was an icon-- the last white elephant of the old morality of the stiff, imperfect world. His insurrection was a thorn in the flesh of Marek. To get him on the ground, or to break him altogether, was not only a policy, but a philosophy.
You still hold on to you, flesh, brother, he said to the glass, the lines a forgotten quotation of a long gone-by time. You still believe that there is anything left to save.
He stood and watched, way down below, a small, trailed vehicle with Kael and two other ugly men rushing out of the gates of the Citadel, sending a spout of gray dust into the air.
I am going to torch you out of that illusion. And the ashes will raise you at last.